1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus and method of allowing various devices to reproduce information stored in a unique file format.
2. Related Background Art
Conventionally, a digital still camera which photoelectrically converts sensed optical image data into electrical image data using an image pickup device (photoelectric conversion device) and records the image data in a recording medium (memory) is known.
In this digital still camera, since the electrical image data after photoelectric conversion has a large quantity of digital data, the image data is generally compressed and encoded to reduce the data amount, and stored in a memory incorporated in the digital still camera as a compressed image file.
For the compressed image file, a compression scheme unique to the digital still camera is often used. For this reason, a compressed image file having a unique file format in place of a general-purpose file format is stored in the memory.
Even when JPEG (Joint Photographic coding Experts Group) format, a standard scheme of coding a still image, is used, a file format different from the normal JPEG file format is often employed by, e.g., omitting the header. This is equivalent to the use of a compression scheme that is unique to each digital still camera.
As described above, the conventional digital still camera stores the picked up image in the memory as a compressed image file in a unique file format. To reproduce the compressed image file stored in the memory, the decoder side needs to expand the compressed image file using an expansion (decoding) scheme corresponding to the compressed image file.
More specifically, unless the compressed image file is expanded by image processing software allowing expansion of a compressed image file in a unique file format, the image cannot be displayed on a screen. For this reason, a picked up image cannot be immediately reproduced.
The compressed image file in the unique file format cannot be expanded using general image processing software, so image processing software (image processing program) exclusively used for the digital still camera must be prepared.
More specifically, when the image is to be displayed on an external device to reproduce the compressed image file stored in the memory of the digital still camera, the compressed image file cannot be expanded and displayed unless the external device has installed the dedicated image processing software in advance.